Southwest Local Algebra Meeting 2020

Tulane University, New Orleans LA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports participation in the Southwest Local Algebra Meeting 2020, held at Tulane University on March 7 – March 8, 2020. This conference will facilitate interactions between students and faculty from institutions in the Southwest who have interests in ring theory. The study of rings, in the broadest sense, is crucial to many branches of mathematics, including commutative and non-commutative geometry, group representations, number theory, coding theory, and cryptography. Algebraists in the Southwest region pursue research on a variety of topics under the umbrella of pure and applied ring theory. The meeting will bring together students and faculty from a variety of institutions for inspiring talks, with ample time for scientific interaction, providing opportunities for participants to begin new collaborations and catalyzing new research projects. About 70 participants are expected, including students and young and senior faculty from throughout the South and Southwestern USA. The participation of students from underrepresented minority groups, women, untenured faculty, and faculty at non-Ph.D. granting institutions is particularly encouraged. Six experts will deliver hour-long talks on topics within their areas of specialty. The lectures are intended to be accessible to graduate students. The meeting will also feature three hour-long poster sessions in which the participating students will present their research. Participants will discuss several key problems in commutative algebra, including progress on finding bounds for Betti numbers, a topic that has significant implications for classical problems in combinatorics and algebraic geometry, including Cayley-Bacharach theory. Several speakers work in combinatorial or computational algebraic geometry and will also shed light on connections between these fields and commutative algebra. Finally, the research expertise of one speaker is in Representation Theory, providing an opportunity to introduce ring theorists to problems in a different field close to their areas of work. More information can be found at the conference webpage: http://www.math.ttu.edu/~lchriste/slam2020.html. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.